29 January 2013

As you will see from the report below, there has been a proposition to impose a 20p per litre tax on sugary drinks. Well, I am not in favour of such taxes but, if anything should be taxed, this is probably a good one, in my view. But there are several parts of this report which show that proponents of both sides are trying to mislead.I have added comments as we go.

REPORT CALLS FOR SUGARY DRINKS TAX

By Andrew Woodcock, Press Association Political Editor

Sugary drinks should be subject to a new tax, which could
add 20p a litre totheir price, with the proceeds going towards child health,
a report said today.

The report by food and farming charity Sustain said that
the Government couldraise #1 billion a year from a sugary drinks duty to pay
for free school mealsand measures to encourage children to eat fruit and
vegetables.

The levy would also help save lives by cutting consumption
of sugar-ladendrinks, said the report, which has been backed by more than
60 organisationsincluding the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, Friends of
the Earth, theNational Heart Forum and the Royal Society for Public
Health.

Diet-related illness is now costing the NHS £6 billion
every year, said thereport.

Sustain urged Chancellor George Osborne to introduce a
sugary drinks duty inhis March 20 Budget and to channel most of the cash raised
into a Children'sFuture Fund for programmes to improve children's health and
future well-being.

"We are delighted that so many organisations want to
challenge the Governmentto show it has a public health backbone by including a
sugary drinks duty inBudget 2013.

"It's a simple and easy-to-understand measure which will
help save lives byreducing sugar in our diets and raising much-needed money
to protect children'shealth."

Sustain chairman Mike Rayner, of Oxford University's
Department of PublicHealth, added: "Just as we use fiscal measures to
discourage drinking andsmoking and help prevent people from dying early, there is
now lots of evidencethat the same approach would work for food.

"This modest proposal goes some way towards making the
price of food reflectits true costs to society.

"Our obesity epidemic causes debilitating illness,
life-threatening diseasesand misery for millions of people. It is high time
Government did somethingeffective about this problem." (Couldn't agree more.But I doubt they will. When the Obesity Steering Group reports on 25 February, I'll bet they advocate more of the same old, same old . . .)

Where this has gone wrong, in my view, is that Sustain is saying tax sugar (which is a 50-50 mix of glucose and fructose)in soft drinks but encourage children to eat more fructose in fruit and glucose in starchy vegetables, or to put it another way: Discourage children to eat sugar which contains fructose and glucose, but encourage children to eat foods that contains fructose and glucose!

The director general of the British Soft Drinks
Association, Gavin Partington,said: "Obesity is a serious and complex problem (He's right), but a tax
on soft drinks,which contribute just 2% of the total calories in the
average diet, will nothelp address it. (Right again.Lots of other carbohydrate-rich foods also contribute. Why just select one?)

"Over the last 10 years, the consumption of soft drinks
containing added sugarhas fallen by 9% while the incidence of obesity has
increased by 15%. (Wouldn't surprise me. 'Healthy eating' is also fattening.)

"We all recognise our industry has a role to play in the
fight againstobesity, which is why soft drinks companies have already
taken action to ensurethey are playing their part. Sixty-one per cent of soft
drinks now contain noadded sugar (True, but they contain even more harmful artificial sweeteners) and we have seen soft drinks companies lead the
way in committing tofurther, voluntary action as part of the Government's
Responsibility Deal

Calorie Reduction Pledge.

"These commitments include, for example, reducing the sugar
content in theirproducts and introducing smaller packs. (But at the same price so children buy more of them and increase profit margins! - I suspect)

"At present, 10p out of every 60p can of drink already goes
to the Governmentthanks to VAT. Putting up taxes even further will put
pressure on people'spurses at a time when they can ill afford it. (Not really. Who needs sodas?) It's worth
noting that Denmark recentlyscrapped such a tax." (No, they didn't! The Danish government taxed saturated fats which are beneficial and tend to reduce obesity and associated diseases. They repealed the tax when - surprise, surprise - they found it didn't work.)

22 January 2013

It all started with 'high cholesterol', then came the 'good' and the 'bad' cholesterols. Now we have the last member of the notorious trio: the 'ugly cholesterol'.

The risk of ischaemic heart disease -- the leading cause of death worldwide -- is three times higher in persons with high levels of the so-called 'ugly' cholesterol. This is the finding of a new study of 73,000 Danes, which is shedding light on a long debate on this topic. The results have just been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Most individuals believe that high cholesterol is life-threatening (despite all the evidence to the contrary). And many 'know' which type of cholesterol is the most frequent killer -- the 'bad' one, LDL -- or is it just the small, dense LDL and not the fluffy stuff.

Up until now, cholesterol has been divided into 'the good' HDL cholesterol, 'the bad' LDL cholesterol, with all the other sub-fractions, IDL, VLDL, etc, not getting a look in.

But now another 'cholesterol' has turned up in the mix: 'the ugly' cholesterol AKA 'remnant cholesterol'. And this one, it seems, is the really bad guy.

Professor Børge Nordestgaard, Chief Physician at Copenhagen University Hospital and Clinical Professor at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at University of Copenhagen says:

"LDL cholesterol or 'the bad' cholesterol' is of course bad, but our new study reveals that the ugly cholesterol likewise is the direct cause of atherosclerosis resulting in ischemic heart disease and early death. By examining 73,000 persons, we found that an increase in the ugly cholesterol triples the risk of ischemic heart disease, which is caused by lack of oxygen to the heart muscle due to narrowing or blocking of the coronary arteries"

"I hope that this new knowledge will lead to better preventive treatment including lifestyle changes, as more than one in five individuals in affluent countries suffers from high ugly cholesterol. We also hope that the pharmaceutical industry will develop new drugs targeted specifically at raised ugly cholesterol levels"

So, what is ugly cholesterol?"Ugly cholesterol is the result of high blood levels of normal fat (triglycerides)," says Børge Nordestgaard. "The most important cause of high ugly cholesterol is overweight and obesity. Persons with high ugly cholesterol should therefore be advised to lose weight, but drugs such as statins and fibrates may also lower levels of ugly cholesterol in the blood."

Samples from 73,000 Danes with mutationsAnette Varbo, physician and PhD student at Copenhagen University Hospital, Was part of the research team behind the new findings. She says that the findings shed light on a long-standing debate among researchers on the so-called triglycerides, atherosclerosis and cholesterol. She says:

"To be able to examine the relationship between ugly cholesterol and heart disease, we have used blood samples from persons having a mutation which means that they suffer from high ugly cholesterol their entire life. The research findings do therefore not depend on their lifestyle patterns in general. Unhealthy lifestyle factors such as smoking, fatty foods and overweight all increase the risk of heart disease, and the blood samples from persons having these mutations thus give the most accurate results"

So, another good reason to watch your weight, it seems. And the best way to do that is with a low-carb, high-fat diet.

Patents on statins are running out. What's the betting that BigPharma will now search for new drugs, or revamp existing ones for this 'new' use. And when those patents run out, no doubt there will be another 'cholesterol' discovered, and then another, and so on . . . until we have The Magnificent Seven.

02 January 2013

Supports Chapter 8:Why ‘five portions’?

Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role.

The sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity.

A third of US children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolised differently in the body.

Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose, while high-fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim.

Doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food", said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr Robert Sherwin.

With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said.

"As a result, the desire to eat continues - it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Healthand Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell.

He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.Researchers are now testing obese people to determine if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in the study.

But there is one other source of fructose which the study neglected — fruit. While many already know that high-fructose corn syrup is not healthy, we are told by the 'experts' that fruit is healthy. Yet the sugar that makes fruit sweet is pure fructose! Go figure, as our American cousins say.

Trick and Treat: how 'healthy eating is making us ill

About Me

Nutritional author, lecturer and journalist; doctorate in nutritional science; 2002 Sophie Coe Prize winner; currently: a director of the Foundation for Thymic Cancer Research; a founder member of the Fluoride Action Network; a founder member of THINCS –The International Network of Cholesterol Sceptics; and an honorary member of the board of the Weston A Price Foundation.
E-mail: barry@second-opinions.co.uk